AHMEDABAD, India (AP) — The most powerful earthquake to strike India in a half century rocked the subcontinent Friday, killing more than 2,000 people, injuring 3,000 and leaving survivors spending the night by campfires near the rubble of their homes.
The 7.9 magnitude temblor in western Gujarat state, close to the border with Pakistan, shook high-rise towers 600 miles away in the capital, New Delhi. The quake was also felt in the mountains of Nepal, some 1,000 miles from the epicenter, and in coastal Bangladesh, a distance of about 1,200 miles.
"The earthquake is a calamity of national magnitude," Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said. "We have decided to meet the emergency on a war footing. This is the time for people to rally around."
The quake struck at 8:50 a.m. as many cities were beginning celebrations for India's 51st Republic Day, which commemorates the adoption of the country's constitution.
In Ahmedabad, Gujarat's commercial capital and a sprawling city of 4.5 million, helmeted rescue workers used iron rods to pry slabs of concrete and metal, searching for survivors. Women wept and rocked back and forth, watching as the few available bulldozers and cranes pushed through the piles of stone that once had housed families and shops.
Beds, children's toys and clothes lay abandoned in the debris, lamp posts and electric pylons were twisted and many buildings were left leaning precariously.
After night fell, with temperatures at 55 degrees, survivors spread blankets and huddled around campfires.
"There is a great panic among the people and they have spilled out onto the streets," said Haren Panya, home minister of Gujarat. Because of the aftershocks, "We have asked people to move out of old buildings."
The 2,063 deaths in India were all recorded in Gujarat state — including hundreds in Ahmedabad — where buildings swayed for more than two minutes, said P.I. Kanpuri, a police officer at the emergency state control room in Gandhinagar, the state capital. Ten people died in Pakistan when two houses collapsed.
Authorities in India said 3,200 people were injured.
No damage or injuries were reported in the rest of India, although many people said they felt dizzy because of the earthquake's lengthy rolling movement.
The epicenter was near Bhuj, a desert town of 150,000 people in Gujarat. Ninety percent of the houses in Bhuj were damaged, said Cabinet minister Pramod Mahajan. Kanpuri said 1,400 people in Bhuj district had been killed.
The quake did no damage to the two 220-megawatt nuclear plants in Gujarat, authorities said. But gas pipelines, most power supply stations, phone lines and water service were knocked out across the arid state, which is prone to drought.
In Ahmedabad, a center of India's textile industry, as many as 50 multistory buildings crumbled. Hundreds of people besieged the fire station asking for help to dig out their relatives, said fire chief Rajesh Bhat.
"This is an emergency. We are facing a riotous crowd," Bhat said. "A fear psychosis is developing in the city. People have fled their homes and are taking refuge in open fields."
Corpses were piled up on the verandah of the N.S. Hospital, while patients overflowing into the hallways wailed and screamed with broken limbs and bleeding wounds. Press Trust of India reported 70 people died awaiting treatment.
Bruised and bleeding bodies were laid in rows, covered with blankets as relatives sat by mourning.
The Indian government said it was flying 10,000 tents, 10,000 tons of grain, 20 doctors and surgeons, communications and seismology experts to Gujarat. Vajpayee sent his home minister, Lal K. Advani, who said the death toll "could be 1,000 or more."
Vajpayee made no appeal for international aid, saying those needs were being assessed.
President Bush, the United Nations, and Pakistan's army ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf sent condolences. Bush said the United States is willing to provide assistance if needed, and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance announced that it will send a five-member earthquake assessment team to India on Sunday.
The quake was the most powerful to strike India since Aug. 15, 1950, when an 8.5 magnitude temblor killed 1,538 people in northeastern Assam state.
Mahajan insisted that Friday's quake measured 6.9, according to a preliminary figure given by the Indian Meteorological Institute. However, the U.S. Geological Survey, taking an average of seismograph measurements from around the world, said it was 7.9.
There were least 83 aftershocks, several measuring up to 5.6 magnitude, in the 10 hours after the quake, said the seismological department at the Bhaba Atomic Center. An apparent aftershock also hit Bangladesh, where hundreds of panicked residents flooded into the streets of Satkhira, on the border with India.
In Ahmedabad, about 70 children and some teachers were feared dead in the debris of their school building, while 19 engineering students were believed trapped in a collapsed college elsewhere in the city.
Baijubahi, an Ahmedabad man who uses only one name, said his wife was killed in the earthquake and six members of his family were still trapped in their building.
"The police are trying to persuade me to go to the hospital for my wife's post-mortem," he said. "I'm more concerned about the rest, who could have survived."
In the town of Surat — where police reported at least 31 dead — three people were killed in a stampede at a diamond factory. When the quake hit, diamond workers in the three-story factory crowded into a narrow stairwell and tried to push their way to the only exit, said police official Vineet Gupta.
Elsewhere in the country, the quake caused high-rise buildings to sway from New Delhi in the north, to Bombay in the west, and Madras in the south and Calcutta in the east, more than a thousand miles from the epicenter.
In the desert state of Rajasthan, the eighth-century Jaisalmer Fort, a popular tourist attraction, was damaged. Some of the distinctive yellow stones supporting the gate fell and the walls developed cracks.
Millions of Hindus at the world's largest religious gathering in Allahabad, in Uttar Pradesh, more than 1,000 miles east of the epicenter, felt the ground sway under them. No injuries were reported.
India's financial capital, Bombay, was closed for the holiday. People were sleeping late or having breakfast when the skyscrapers began swaying. They rushed out onto the streets in their nightgowns as dogs barked and birds screeched.